Sorry for not replying to the comments! I've been checking them every day and taking care of stuff that needs to be fixed if another mod hasn't already.

Also, I am about to redo the database indexes from scratch in a last ditch effort to speed things up for the last 3-4 months we're still here with the old host and code. I've got indexing as close to as optimized as it can be without using up all the database space we have (or being so super-indexed that the time spent keeping up with the indexes negates any performance gain), but there are still a few other things I can do. The site may be a bit slow (even by its current standard) in the meantime.

Edit: Done!! Things should be at least a little bit faster now. Searching for quotes by Fundie, Board, and Comment Author is quite noticeably faster on my end at least, despite still being pretty slow — and I'd like to know if searching by those things is faster on your end too, as well as whether the rest of the site in general feels any snappier.

There are a couple for the speed up in search. One, I looked over the stored procedures that handle search and fixed a few things that could have been done better. I probably should have caught and tweaked 'em earlier when I was refactoring the Transact-SQL for searching a while back, eliminating redundant code and splitting search into three procedures and two views. (Protip: JOINs and WITH...AS are your friends. So are views. I'm pretty sure Distind didn't write most of the stored procedures in the FSTDT database by hand, because a lot of it has machine-generated-code written all over it, and I think he would have done a better job.) Anyway. Aside from that, I did a minor tweak to the indexes for searching as well, and it made a bigger difference than I thought it would. Even though I'm pretty good with databases — or I at least (like to) think I am — I'm not perfect, otherwise it would have dawned on me much earlier than now to sort indexes by Visibility in descending order first. Also, deleting all the indexes and re-creating them from scratch probably helped some too, since that eliminated any fragmentation. I really should do database housekeeping a little more frequently — though I rebuilt all the indexes just two months ago!

@SomeApe: Sorry I didn't reply to this sooner! I edited this cretin's comments to say the opposite of what they originally did, and I changed its IP address to "lol fail" to prevent it from editing them. I banned its actual IP before I changed it. I have a juvenile mind.

IP addresses are stored in the database as strings of text, so I can use a little SQL magic and change them to whatever I want, provided it's less than 16 characters. The FSTDT code doesn't mind as long as I don't try to ban strings that are not IPs. If I try to do that, the banhammer code throws an error because it doesn't know what to do with an IP address that contains something other than digits, periods, question marks, or asterisks.

(The question marks and asterisks are called "wildcards." They let me banhammer a range of IPs without needing to add all the IPs in the range manually. The reason I don't let other mods use this is because I'm afraid they'll be overzealous with it. I'll add code to the new site that lets mods use wildcards, too, but limit the range they can ban to the last three digits of an IP.)

@Everyone: We're making progress on the new site, but we're going to miss the planned November release by probably a couple months. I was way too indecisive about what programming language to use. I ultimately decided on Elixir with the Phoenix web framework because Pyro has awesome taste in programming languages, but I've had to spent a lot of time learning it. Initializing databases and writing queries using Ecto is completely new to me, so is letting the regular code do that instead of using raw SQL, so I've been trying to adapt to it. I'm still probably going to initialize the new database with a plain SQL script, though.

I wish you all a happy ! Don't let superstition force the decisions you make in life! Like those idiots who build hotels without a 13th floor or cruise ships without a 13th deck. That's really stupid. Don't do that. 13 is a number like 12 and 14 and we mustn't discriminate it. ;)

Could we get a top 10 quotes a month for each section? Each month we could have the top 10 list would reset.

Could we get a similar top 25 list for each section?

The reasonsI suggest these are because it would allow the top 100 list (or top 250 list if we keep it) to be more dynamic as it would allow newer posts to receive more attention, increasing their chances of making it to he top 100 or 250. It would also make voting on the top quotes of the year easier if a backlog of these top 10 and 25 lists is kept.

@Everyone who reported "It": Thank you for reporting It. I'll let It stay a little while longer. The filter already ate some of Its posts, as did the banned IP list.

@dxdydz: Already got something like that in mind for the elusive new site I keep talking about. Give me a few months.

@Everyone: Gonna sit down and (hopefully) do some serious coding this week. I have Thursdays, Fridays, and the weekends free. When I have work, I come home bone tired (at least mentally) and don't really feel like doing anything, meaning whatever I churn out will be half-assed shit anyway. You guys can check out the progress (and code!) at our GitHub repository. (It's mostly full of test stuff right now.) If you want to help out, see here.

When I get off of work today, I'll throw up a couple of metaposts: one explaining all of this and another for nominating categories for the 2017 FSTDT Awards.

Edit:Got the metapost for the latter up! Will add a link to it to the main page when I get home from work. But if you're reading this, feel free to go ahead snd start commenting.